Federal IT workers frustrated with data center downtime

Aug. 15, 2014 - 06:00AM
|

Data center downtime frustrates many federal employees. (NASA)

ADVERTISEMENT

Most federal IT professionals say that data center reliability is a top priority, with nearly half saying that downtime makes it impossible for them to support their agencies missions, according to a new survey.

Public-private IT partnership Meritalk surveyed a total of 300 federal IT workers with half of those working in data centers and the other half responsible for data center policy or functions.

Some federal data center professionals don’t think their agency is doing a good job managing downtime at their data centers – 36 percent give their IT department a “C” grade for downtime management while only 29 percent believe their IT department fully understands the impact downtime has on agency work.

Only 23 percent of those surveyed gave their agency’s data centers an “A” for effectively delivering information to federal employees on a daily basis.

“Federal field workers are dependent on instant information access to do their jobs – from food inspection and traffic control, to healthcare and disaster aid,” said Rob Potter, vice president of federal at Symantec, which underwrote the survey. “Agile data centers –that optimize storage and ensure 24x7 availability, while accelerating virtualization and cloud adoption – are critical for efficient government operations and service.”

But out of those surveyed about half said they lack the data storage, computational power and personnel they need to provide a reliable data center and that increased leadership support will be a top factor in improving data centers.

“Nobody’s going to give up their umbrella if the roof keeps leaking,” said Stephen O’Keeffe, founder of MeriTalk. “The mission trumps IT savings.”